Information Retrieval

Department of Computing Science

 

Prof. Keith van Rijsbergen            

Phone     4582                Email:  keith@dcs.gla.ac.uk           

Computing Science  S161                Availability: by appointment                                         

 

Dr Iadh Ounis      

Phone     5652                Email:  ounis@dcs.gla.ac.uk          

Computing Science  S083                Availability: by appointment

               

Dr Joemon Jose                (Course coordinator)

Phone     5653                Email:  jj@dcs.gla.ac.uk  

Computing Science  S082                Availability: by appointment                         

Aims

This module aims to present students with details of the issues involved in building tools to search large collections of documents and in particular within the context of the world wide web.

Objectives

By the end of this module the student should:

·         Understand and be able to implement an IR system

·         Discuss how an IR system should be evaluated in terms of the system performance and the user’s satisfaction with the system

·         Describe the connection between hypertext and standard IR systems

·         Understand how techniques such as natural language processing, artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction and visualization integrate with IR

·         Understand the standard methods for cross-lingual retrieval (giving a request for information in one language and retrieving documents in a different language)

·         Understand the techniques involved in retrieving information from the World Wide Web

·         Understand the relationship between information retrieval and text mining.

·         Understand the advanced web applications.

 

Content

The following topics will be covered in detail:

·         Architecture of Information Retrieval Systems

·         Information Retrieval Models

·         Adaptive systems (Relevance Feedback, Filtering and Recommendation Systems etc.)

·         Differences and similarities between databases and information retrieval

·         Clustering techniques for data organization and visualization

·         Digital libraries and metadata management

·         Semi structured data retrieval

·         Natural Language Processing techniques for IR

·         Language modeling approach

·         Evaluation of IR systems

·         Information retrieval systems and human computer interaction

·         Hypertext systems and the world-wide-web

·         Information Retrieval on the World Wide Web (search engines, crawlers etc.)

·         Information Extraction & Text mining techniques

·         Cross-language retrieval techniques

·         Electronic commerce and semantic web

Tutorials and workshops

Tutorial exercises based on lecture material and workshops devoted to the assessed exercises will be held regularly throughout the course.

Prerequisites

Basic mathematics knowledge

Assessment

This course will be assessed through an examination (80%) and assessed work (20%).

Credits

This module is worth 10 credits.

Reading list

Text Books:

Finding Out About: Search Engine Technology from a cognitive Perspective, by Richard, K. Belew, Cambridge University Press 2001.

Lectures on Information Retrieval: 3rd European Summer -School, ESSIR 2000, LNCS 1980. (Available on the web: Accessible from University computers)

Information Retrieval by Keith van Rijsbergen. 1979. (Out of Print; postcript version will be made available in a cd-rom)

Recommended Books:

Modern Information Retrieval, by R. Baeza-yates and B. Ribeiro-Neto., Addison-Wesley and ACM Press, 1999, ISBN: 0-201-39829-X (£29.95) (Level 11 Main Lib Bibliog A165 1999-B)

 

Readings in Information Retrieval, Karen Sparck Jones and Peter Willett (eds), Morgan Kaufmann, 1997. ISBN 1-55860-454-5, (Level 4 Main Lib Computing qH33 1997-S)